Angine de Poitrine Are the Real Deal
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love polka-dotted French Canadian microtonal math rock
The first things you notice are the costumes. In clips that have been difficult to avoid on my social feeds over the last two weeks, two outlandish figures face each other, one seated behind a drum kit and another holding a double-necked combination bass and guitar. Their outfits are part Yayoi Kusama, part Eyes Wide Shut, part Yo Gabba Gabba!: polka dots, body paint, giant masks with disconcerting noses. The guitarist looks ready to lead a shadowy cult ceremony, the bassist like an elaborately vandalized Easter Island head. Oh god, you might think to yourself, this looks like some real Burning Man shit.
This more or less describes my first encounter with Angine de Poitrine, an anonymous Quebecois duo whose KEXP live session attracted 1.2 million views in its first 10 days online. The view count is impressive on its own—compare it to that of a long-established band like Cut Copy, whose KEXP session from a few days before currently sits at 14,000 views—and more so considering the sort of music Angine de Poitrine play. The guitar and bass, for one thing, are microtonal, meaning they’re set up to play in smaller divisions of pitch than the standard 12 notes of the Western chromatic scale. Microtones show up in all sorts of traditional musics from around the world, but rarely in rock, pop, and so on—in a Western context, you’re more likely to encounter them in the challenging and insular world of avant-garde classical music.
Even setting aside the unusual tuning system, Agine de Poitrine do not write the sort of music you’d expect to go viral. It’s dense, dissonant, and almost entirely instrumental, full of wonky rhythms and jagged melodic lines, delivered with a mixture of jazz-school precision and punk-rock abandon. Their few vocals are chanted through some sort of effects pedals that make them sound like they’re being beamed in by satellite, and used only as occasional rhythmic accents, not really what you’d call singing. This is music for nerds, for people who post on the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard subreddit or have strong opinions about Don Caballero’s discography. Yet the people I first saw tweeting about the KEXP performance seemed… normal. I can’t find it now, but I swear the very first one was wearing a suit and tie in his profile picture. And the tenor of the average post was less Hmmm, I can definitely hear the Zappa influence than OMG this is so weird… but I think I like it??
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